What it is
Shakespeare's Ophelia floats in a river, half-sunk, singing as she drifts toward her death, surrounded by exact, glowing riverbank plants.
What it represents
Grief that has no one to hold it. Hamlet's cruelty and her father's death leave her with nothing to hold onto, and the stream takes her.
The symbolism
The flowers speak a language: the poppy for sleep and death, violets for faithfulness, daisies for innocence, pansies for love in vain. The lush, patient nature around her is indifferent and beautiful at once, which is how grief often feels.
Poems and letters beside it
poem
In Memoriam A.H.H.
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1850)
Ophelia floating, grief as surrender to current, surrounded by beauty that cannot help. The most iconic Pre-Raphaelite image of the person whom sorrow has carried away.
prose poem
On Death (from The Prophet)
Kahlil Gibran (1923)
Death as another movement of the river rather than an ending. Ophelia floats on the current, held as much as lost.
